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John Muir and the Ice That Started A Fire

How A Visionary and the Glaciers of Alaska Changed America

John Muir and the Ice That Started a Fire takes two of the most compelling elements in the narrative of wild America, John Muir and Alaska, and combines them into a brisk and engaging biography.

John Muir was a fascinating man who was many things: inventor, scientist, revolutionary, druid (a modern day Celtic priest), husband, son, father and friend, and a shining son of the Scottish Enlightenment -- both in temperament and intellect. Kim Heacox, author of The Only Kayak, bring us a story that evolves as Muir's life did, from one of outdoor adventure into one of ecological guardianship. Muir went from impassioned author to leading activist. He would popularize glaciers unlike anybody else, and be to glaciers what Jacques Cousteau would be to the oceans and Carl Sagan to the stars

The book also offers an environmental caveat on global climate change and the glaciers' retreat alongside a beacon of hope: Muir shows us how one person changed America, helped it embrace its wilderness, and in turn, gave us a better world.

In 2005, Californians had to choose a design for its commemorative quarter. Hundreds of submissions -- the iconic Hollywood sign above Hollywood Hills, the 1849 Gold Rush, the Golden Gate Bridge, etc. -- fell away until one remained: an image of John Muir. 2014 will mark the 100th anniversary of Muir's death. Muir's legacy is that he reordered our priorities and contributed to a new scientific revolution that was picked up a generation later by Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson, and is championed today by influential writers like E.O. Wilson and Jared Diamond.

Heacox takes us into how Muir changed our world, advanced the science of glaciology and popularized geology. How he got people out there . How he gave America a new vision of Alaska, and of itself.

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"As Muir saw it, you had to be open-minded, unblinded by rigid doctrine. Science and faith were inseparable. The best science... demanded head knowledge, to be sure, but also heart and - most important - imagination. Alaska provided the natural laboratory and wild church of John Muir's dreams..." Inspirational, this book.

This is a wonderful book about the founder of the Sierra Club, "a kind of ecstatic holy man" who found God in nature and goodness in people. John Muir saw "Vigorous Economic Growth Forever" becoming the great American secular religion. He wrote that "nothing dollarable is safe," and worked to protect wilderness areas in a National Park system.